Ask Lemmy

When I was in elementary school one of my classrooms had Stratego among the board games meant for bad weather days or waiting after school.

I had previously played Stratego and liked it, but every single other kid in this classroom read that the 'Spy' piece could kill the 'General' (the most powerful) piece and concluded that the 'Spy' could therefore kill any piece on the board. I was shouted down by everyone for pointing out the actual wording of the rules and that a 'Spy' is called that because it's obviously supposed to be a sneaky piece.

Nobody agreed and just played the game with the 'Spy' as a rampaging super piece killing everything. That was pretty miserable.

I have had the displeasure of playing the two worst video game of all time. E.T. The Extra-Terestrial and Custers Revenge. Both were Atari games released in 1982.

Nobody should answer "Monopoly" because it's intended to be un-fun, as an object lesson in why monopolies are bad.

I rented Superman 64 at Blockbuster once.

Don't reccomend.

Much broken.

Such bugs.

Wow.

Capitalism

7-yo me hated the original Ghostbusters game on NES. So much so that I devised a plan to get my birthday money back.

Toys R Us would only refund unopened games, but you could get an even exchange if a game was 'defective'. So I made up some mumbo jumbo about how something didn't work in the game, and my mom got it swapped for me (she was nervous for some reason). Took the unopened game to a different Toys R Us location and got my money back. I felt like a criminal mastermind.

I can't really remember what I didn't like about the game...probably I had a certain expectation as a big Ghostbusters fan that no NES game could meet.

Mario Party 9 was so bad I think I only played it one time.

The moment I saw the car thing and read that there was no way to get around it, we quit and went back to the older games.

10-player game of munchkin. Could feel my soul trying to crawl out of my mouth after the 3rd hour.

Space Station 13 is simulteanously the worst and best game I have played depending on the station you choose. I've been one a shift where we fought back every monstrosity thrown at us with ease. I've also been on a shift where I am the only medical crew and the capitan is a traitor and why is the ship already on fire its been 10 minutes?

Played an old LoTR game for the SNES that was so full of bugs, it actually held my interest longer than it should have because I was curious whether the game could even be completed.

Snakes and Ladders is the only game bad enough to avoid that I've nevertheless been obliged to play repeatedly.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Monopoly. Literally designed to be frustratingly unplayable to represent the frustratingly unplayable user experience of capitalism, but people insist on playing it anyway.

AD&D 2e. Insists it's a game about exciting fantasy adventuring, then all the rules are about painfully slow tactical minutiae. The combat mechanics are taken from a game about modern naval warfare, hence bigger Armor Class means easy to hit. It's unclear why anyone thought ships with guns was a good model for medieval sword fighting. Entire sections of rules have to be ignored - hello encumberance - and gameplay regularly has to stop to look up charts, tables or niche rules like grappling.

Screamball. Like ping pong, except the point goes to whoever screams the loudest during a volley. We made it up as teenagers. It was awful.

Mario Party.

I. Fucking. HATE. Mario Party.

Arc: Survival (dinosaur game). Shit. Played for 15 minutes. Poor optimization and almost 1tb of space needed… wtf.

Monopoly. Tragically boring.

Long format games like monopoly, risk, etc.

The game is dead long before it's over.

Master of Orion III, a 4X game from around the turn of the century. The two previous instalments were fun strategy games. This one was like playing the world's prettiest spreadsheet.

Killer Bunnies.

With an honorable mention to Cthulhu Dice, Fluxx, and Chicken of the Sea (that last one literally, literally unplayable)

WWF King of the Ring on Gameboy.

Even as a kid who was a hughe wrestling fan and was long looking forward to getting it, I rarely played that poor game.

The graphics and sound was bad, even for Gameboy standards, and as far as I remember, you could only hurt your opponent with punches or kicks but NOT with wrestling moves. In a freaking wrestling game...

Shadow Madness was an amazingly bad PS1 RPG. The details have faded with time, but I remember it was an incoherent hodgepodge of every RPG trope, every party member was a bad cliche, the random encounter system was this terrible "red light, green light" thing. It was insultingly easy, and Harv-5 was like someone's shitty Shadow the Hedgehog OC of Bender from Futurama.

I have had a grudge against this terrible game for 25 years.

Most bad games aren't really a terrible experience. Usually, it takes a few minutes, maybe an hour max, to realize "wow this game is bad and not worth putting any more time into".

I think the worst games are the ones that can suck you in with the promise of being good. For me, that was Catherine.

The game has 3 main phases. The main "gameplay" is 3D block pushing puzzles that are presented as dream sequences for the main character. They start off simple, but add mechanics and complexity as you would expect from any good puzzle game. Then there is the time you spend with the main character awake hanging out at a bar, talking to other characters as a social sim game. The characters seem varies and like they could be interesting. Finally, there are animated cutscenes that are pretty good looking that show what your main character does throughout the day, between waking up and ending up at the bar every evening.

The biggest problem is the writing. The main character starts off as a pretty shitty, selfish asshole. At first I played hoping to see him learn and grow as a character. When it became clear that wasn't going to happen I instead started to hope that he at least suffered some consequences for his actions. But... No, he doesn't. He just stays an asshole the whole time. None of the other characters really go anywhere either. And while the gameplay started off good, it quickly burns through all of the block pushing mechanics they thought of and turns into a repetitive slog. It really felt like they only made the first 1/3rd of a complete game and decided to just copy and paste that to pad out time instead of actually finishing the game.

RoboCop for the NES. Just terrible.